Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Jon Udell on G+'s distracting chatter

... I came to accept a lot of distracting chatter as the price of discovering things to read. But Google+ seems to be the camel’s-back-breaking straw. The price has gone too high. So I’m rediscovering what made the blog network so thrilling to me a decade ago: unmediated access to people writing for the love of it in their own online spaces. Distracting chatter has its uses. But it’s optional.

G+ needs to become useful. If iG+ were integrated into Google Reader, so Google Reader Shares became G+ shares, I'd go back to using it. To do that though, Google would have to support topic stream subscription as well as access controls (circles). Likewise, if G+ replaced Blogger Comments I'd definitely use it.

At the moment however, G+ is an inferior version of Facebook (no group/org Pages) without the (shrinking) number of my friends and family who post on FB [1].

[1] My experience of FB is changing. At first friends and family were sharing and it was useful for that. Most have stopped though. On the other hand, "Pages" for clubs and schools and local kid teams are more important. It's moving away from being a social network to a pub/sub group sharing network -- which starts to look like a simplified version of the web with much less anonymity. Rather a lot like late 1980s AOL and CompuServe.[2] Great list of new names. I'm exploring each of them.